Intense imaginal "relationships" longings moodswings violent turbulences creativeelations out of nowhere lifting the undisclosed soul into the clouds in the suburban back yard

"temoignages" moments of witness to a conditionof sudden grace marked in diaries by a star as "special signs" the gold threads in the weave the inexpressibility of life's fleeting moments its transitoryepiphanies a brief shading of light on the sideof a building

the abrupt rising of a flock of birds into the aira piece of classical music heard on the radioa face on the bus a brother's smile the odd buoyantbeing-alive quality everywhere a rare harmony and calm as if a dark sky opened suddenlyto reveal with wondrous clarity the constellations he so loved

Dec. 9, 1948 (Wednesday)

the "all over" feeling that makes of the incidental a never ceasing wonder and spectacle of the spiritual

11 comments:

Tom, don't you think Cornell's quirky (but touching) habit of shadowing innocent-looking youths has cinematic possibilities? Imagine a bony, oh, Billy Bob Thornton tailing an angelic shopgirl around a Hopperesque Manhatten--like James Stewart and Kim Novak in San Francisco. And then, in Travis Bickle fashion, he writes about her in his diary.

Well, I am trying to imagine JC, in the basement of his mother's cramped little house at 37-08 Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, staring into the mirror of one of his boxes and saying, "Yah talkin to ME?"

This is toooooooooooooooooooooo long for me Thomas, way too long and you expect me to read such! Oh my!*teasing*I do not know this Mister Cornell. I am going to have to go research.The loss of all those 'Caps' has me confused now. I am so use to them with you. Just wait until I start using them, I will confuse you! There is also no punctuation! Why? Ok leaving that aside, the images within are striking and I am especially liking the 'marbles toy birds seen though the magic prisma child's vision the mind assembling a cosmologya bricolage of bits of this and bits of thatmaps pieces of cloth illustrations in encyclopedias'Thought provoking words, you.

There's magic in those boxes,of pasts and imagination. Cornell makes us focus on the rose-tinted maps of our own lives. And i also really like how you've written this piece - filling your own boxes. I don't know if JC ever wrote poetry, but if he had, they would have been in this style.

My little lowercase dust-bit lines were meant as a sort of helpful filler, not so much captions as microcosmic asides, floating between and giving breathing space to the discrete worlds of Cornell's magical bricolage.

(It is true that this time a flock of the usual Caps were left out to graze in the back pasture overnight; I think maybe a little airing every now and again does them a world of good.)

Just to let you know I did go 'research'. I am now knowing a little bit more about this 'self taught' artist and am seeing how your words connect.See, I should do that first before commenting *sigh*But thank you Thomas, for educating me.

It may be the world of a child's wonder -- or of the wonder of the sensitive soul who remains a grownup child -- is a sea of treasures, dreams and mysteries in which all minds are forever drifting boats (barcas a la deriva).

These images, your words are the guiding principles I think of when I write -- that accumulation of detail, the tidbits of life, woven into some fabric. I'm working on that in mixed media, as well, but will never reach Cornell's level.

I will definitely benefit from re-reading your work in light of this comment.

Yes, the intrication and implication of the particulars of the memoria, the places and the persons and the fragments of epiphanic retrieved landscapes, are very Cornellian -- if we were to be able to posit a Cornell transported out of his cramped little basement in Flushing to do his collecting of images and objects in the probably equally mysterious expanses of the plains.